Music Review : Viklarbo Ensemble

Viklarbo, a locally based four-member chamber group in residency at Loyola Marymount University, has an assertive performance style, an aggressive, youthful confidence. Wednesday at Loyola’s Murphy Hall, this interpretive personality was well suited to some of the music, at odds with the rest of it.

Best served was Dvorak’s “Dumky” Trio, Opus 90, in a reading of larger-than-life expressiveness. Its melancholy lyricism was given dramatic arch with broadly sweeping dynamic curves and weighty sonorities. Contrasts were vivid: The dancelike sections were given fast, frenetic flight; they were rhythmically biting, intensely driving.

The music emerged not gently nostalgic, as it sometimes does. Its sadness had more breadth, was more pervasive. Parts of the work had a Mahler-like world-weariness.

This apparent emotionalism didn’t work for Beethoven’s Trio, Opus 11, for clarinet, cello and piano, however. Here, the performance style was like an oversized suit to the classical simplicity of the music. Hard accents, bright tone and a fast but thumping tempo characterized the first movement. The easygoing melody of the second movement and the bubbly, theme-and-variations finale--based on a carefree Italian opera tune--were given ponderous weight they didn’t deserve. Elegance and grace were forgotten.

Also on the program was the premiere of the cello-clarinet version of “Doubles” by Frederick Lesemann, a composer on the USC faculty. The duet is unassuming and conversational. The clarinet blows accented, sustained tones while the cello flutters, plucks and makes glissandi softly in commentary. A fast-moving, seesawing two-note turn is shared and handed off. Isolated, widely spaced notes are traded like pointilistic table tennis balls. It’s easily grasped and modestly amusing.

A suite of pieces from “L’Histoire du Soldat,” arranged for clarinet, piano and violin by Stravinsky himself, completed the program. It was given brisk, crisp, raucous treatment.